Reporter: Mark Colvin
MARK COLVIN: The world now knows that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but that hasn't stopped President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney this week from labelling people who accuse them of faking the evidence as 'dishonest,' 'reprehensible,' 'corrupt' and 'shameless.'
They'd no doubt be surprised that they have some qualified support in that from the former weapons inspector Scott Ritter.
It was Mr Ritter who resigned from the UN weapons inspection force UNSCOM in 1998 over his disillusionment with the way the weapons of mass destruction intelligence was being handled.
He spent the following years arguing that the US had manipulated the WMD intelligence, and he still holds that view.
But paradoxically, Scott Ritter told me today that George W Bush and Dick Cheney were right to attack their Democrat critics on the issue.
SCOTT RITTER: In a way, the President and the Vice-President are half-right. I mean, they say that the Democrats are trying to rewrite history when they say that they were deliberately misled by the Bush administration.
I agree with the Bush administration. The Democrats weren't deliberately misled. They knew all along that this was a lie, that the Bush administration was hyping the case for war. They knew that the policy was regime change and they knew that we had no intention of genuinely disarming Iraq. They voted for the 1998 Iraq Liberation Act.
MARK COLVIN: But wasn't there information that was always privileged to the White House and the Pentagon, information about the uranium from Niger, information about the aluminium tubes and so forth?
SCOTT RITTER: Well, remember you're talking about the most current manifestation of this cycle of hyping the Iraqi threat, that of course being the 2002 version of events. But people have forgotten about Bill Clinton's speech before the American people in December 1998 where he made the same case.
What Bush was doing was nothing new. It was just a continuation of a process, an extreme version of a process, of demonization, where, because we had focused on Saddam, because we had made a decision that Saddam must go, we believed that you could say anything negative about Saddam and people would accept it at face value without question.
MARK COLVIN: You say demonization, but isn't it just as plausible to suggest that the shock in the intelligence community after the first Iraq war had been so great to find that they had underestimated Saddam's capabilities, that that shock had been so great that they were determined not to make the same mistake again?
SCOTT RITTER: But again, we could accept that if the policy was one of disarmament. But as I state over and over again, one has to recognise what the true objective was of the Resolution 687 passed by the Security Council in April 1991, what the true objective was from an American perspective. And that was not to disarm Iraq, but rather to use disarmament as a vehicle to contain Saddam Hussein through the continuation of economic sanctions.
MARK COLVIN: What about the theory that Saddam himself really wanted the world to think that he had the weapons of mass destruction and that also was one of the things that clouded their eyes?
SCOTT RITTER: Again, I don't accept that, because they haven't demonstrated the basis for that argument. I mean, we don't have the stunning confession from Saddam; we don't have the documents that back this up. This is sort of a revisionist history trying to articulate some sort of excuse for the intelligence service.
What we do have, though, that paints a clear picture of what the genuine objectives of the intelligence service was are: a) the directives from consecutive presidential administrations, George Herbert Walker Bush, Bill Clinton and George W Bush, tasking the CIA as their primary objective, vis-a-vis Iraq, the removal of his regime.
This is why when I briefed the director of the CIA in November 1993 about how we had accounted for the totality of Iraq's ballistic missile capabilities we were told by the CIA at that time that they rejected our analysis, that the number of missiles in play was assessed to be 12 to 20 and that number would never change, regardless of what we did.
MARK COLVIN: But was it just the Americans? Because isn't it the case, as one reads, that every Western intelligence service, including for instance the French and the Germans, believed that Saddam was lying about his weapons of mass destruction?
SCOTT RITTER: Well, there's a huge difference then in an assessment that says, 'We don’t believe the Iraqi Government,' and an assessment that says, 'Iraq maintains massive stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction.'
I will concur that every intelligence service in the world had doubts about the veracity of the Iraqi statements, that there was enough reason to distrust the Iraqis, given their past behaviour, and that there was enough doubt cast upon the final disposition of aspects of their programs, so that you couldn't give Iraq a clean bill of health.
But it's incorrect to say that everybody believed Saddam Hussein had these weapons. I can guarantee you, as the person who was running intelligence for the United Nations on the WMD issue in 1998, that as of August 1998 the Israelis for instance believed that Iraq had been fundamentally disarmed. So did the British, so did the French, so did the Germans, so did the Russians … so did the CIA.
And so, you know, there's something that transpired from 1998 to 2003 that changes. And I would say that it was …
MARK COLVIN: And what was that? Was that the Operation Stovepipe, the creation of a sort of parallel intelligence system …
SCOTT RITTER: Well, correct. I …
MARK COLVIN: … to funnel distorted evidence into the White House?
SCOTT RITTER: Certainly. You take a look at the statements of Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell made in 2001, prior to September 11, where they said that Iraq was contained, that Iraq had been largely disarmed and Iraq posed no threat.
Suddenly September 11th 2001 comes along and the Bush administration exploits the horrific act of terror that transpired and uses it as a vehicle to sell a war with Iraq. And this is where you have the process of stove piping taking place. This is where sound analysis is thrown out and hyped up intelligence is plugged in.
MARK COLVIN: All right, so where does this leave us for now and for the future, and particularly if we look at, say, Iran where the new leadership is looking increasingly extremist?
Is credibility now so shot that the world can't effectively do anything about Iran if it does get weapons of mass destruction?
SCOTT RITTER: Well, the credibility is shot. I mean, this is a problem, because I am someone who's not going to articulate that Iran does not pose a threat. I'm very concerned about Iran. People should be concerned about Iran.
I think Iraq has corrupted, in the minds of much of the world, the notion of a United States that's operating within the framework of legitimate international law.
So it is a big problem, because there may well in fact be a genuine threat emanating from Iran that isn't going to be articulated and recognised in a timely fashion because the world doesn't trust the United States.
MARK COLVIN: Former UNSCOM arms inspector, Scott Ritter.
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source: PM
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